Established by Akiko Naka in 2010, Wantedly is a social recruiting platform based in Tokyo that rethinks the entire hiring process.
The largest professional networking service in Japan, it is a digital portal that connects job seekers to companies based on passion, as opposed to pay cheques. It’s become so popular that major brands such as Dropbox, Airbnb, and Uber have jumped onto its platform as well.
It’s been a year since Wantedly launched its Singapore arm in March 2017, and it has already registered at least 1,000 businesses.
How did that happen? The answer lies in the clever use of an AI sales assistant as a force multiplier for their sales team.
The challenge of being a one-man show
Before using an AI sales assistant, Wantedly Singapore’s sales outreach efforts were handled by just one person: Xiandi Loh, the startup’s Head of Business Development.
The process was tedious, repetitive, and incredibly manual.
“Basically, I was just going to LinkedIn, searching for people who are hiring, connecting with them then and there, and trying to get a meeting with them or trying to get them to use the platform on a free trial,” Loh reveals.
His strategy was to touch base with at least 20 companies every week, cold messaging key decision makers from those firms through another mainstream recruiting portal. Out of these 20 leads, Loh lands about five accounts to work with in return.
“The maximum amount of leads that I can reach out to in a month would be maybe 100,” he says.
It was a manageable number for a small team in a small startup. But once they had to scale up, “it was impossible to handle.”
It didn’t help that they had to compete with bigger, more established players in the market such as Indeed, JobStreet, JobsCentral, and Glassdoor.
“Down the funnel, the problem arises because we’re pretty new. People tend to trust job boards with a bigger name. It’s mainly the trust that people don’t have with Wantedly in the Singapore market yet,” Loh shares.
To garner more volume, he needed to learn how to generate mailing lists and how to engage his list of leads in a more efficient, productive way.
That was where Saleswhale came in.
Scaling quickly with the help of an AI sales assistant
Everything changed when Wantedly Singapore decided to try AI sales assistants. In fact, Loh had previously used a sales automation tool that dealt only with the delivery of messages. Follow-ups still had to be managed manually, which was taking up a big portion of his time.
Switching to Saleswhale allowed him to crank the gear up on sales outreach and lead qualification.
What sets Saleswhale apart from traditional automation is the bot’s ability to engage in two-way conversations with leads. No different from having an email exchange with a human sales rep. Saleswhale's AI sales assistant communicates in an easy, conversational tone, and even displays empathy.
It can send attachments, deal with rejections, ask for referrals, and even politely chase unresponsive clients. It can also arrange calls and meetings, and loop you into the thread when a lead has been qualified.
Unlike an human sales rep, however, it can do so at scale. The AI sales assistant is not only capable of sending thousands of customized emails at once, but also engaging in thousands of concurrent conversations.
Seeing impressive sales results
Saleswhale drastically improved Wantedly Singapore’s workflow, making it much easier to scale up. “Every month, we reach out to between 1,200 to 1,500 leads,” says Loh. “Sales is a numbers game. If you can open up the funnel at the top, that’s the best.”
According to Loh, Wantedly Singapore now gets about 50 to 60 qualified leads a month, 20 percent of closed deals, and 60 to 70 percent of the total estimated sales deal pipeline from Saleswhale. The AI sales assistant arms the tiny team with the power to punch way above its weight.
He said, “Sales has been great. Generating leads is quite easy, and we’ve always had a steady stream. We kind of know what to expect every week from Saleswhale, [but] sometimes there’ll be surprises. We have big names that we talk to through Saleswhale. We just put the leads in, forget about it, and suddenly maybe two weeks later, we’ll have a meeting with Nike. That’s very good.”
A complement rather than a substitute for sales
“People always talk about AI replacing human beings. For us, it’s more of complementing than replacing. Even if it replaced me, it freed up my time to do a lot more creative stuff, or stuff that needed human input,” Loh observes.
Ultimately, using an AI sales assistant transformed his role as a salesperson. It replaced him to a certain degree, in that his job no longer involves repetitive and time consuming tasks like email follow ups with leads. But with his new and improved job scope, Saleswhale most certainly serves as a complement to his work.
Saleswhale complements the team’s CRM workflow as well with its BCC feature, which links every automated email to the Hubspot CRM that Wantedly Singapore uses. “Whoever I reach out to, the conversation will be logged into Hubspot [...] That works wonders. We don’t have to do a lot of data entry,” Loh remarks.
Thanks to Saleswhale's AI sales assistant, the team has been consistently able to reach their target MRR. “It has helped us to reach out to a lot of companies in a very short span of time [despite] having a small head count,” Loh says.
With the increased volume of qualified leads, Loh had to bring in an extra hand eventually, but it’s all in the name of expanding the business across the region and the globe. For the Wantedly team, that's a goal no longer far out of reach.
Want to scale your lead outreach and qualification? Request a demo of our AI sales assistant here.
Originally published on 25 April 2018, updated on 18 December 2019
